Grover Ponders |

Custom Drupal Modules - Revisited

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:12 — sgrover

Well now. I've spent the past few days trying to get a custom Drupal module running properly, and have only had partial success. Thus far I am able to create the module file, and get a custom path working, as well as creating a form and using it to update a custom database table. However, that is ONLY after banging my head against the wall many many times.

Database Design - A real world example

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:12 — sgrover

As mentioned in my last post, I have a need to develop a relatively simple issue tracking system. This seemed to be a perfect time to explore the system development process in detail. Today, we'll look at how to "design" a database.

Custom Drupal Modules

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:11 — sgrover

Side tracked once again... sighs.

In this case I find myself in need of a (relatively) simple issue tracking system. Something like Bugzilla is way overkill for me. (For those not in the know, Bugzilla is more or less the standard issue tracking system in the Open Source world.) I've tried the WHUPS system (part of Horde), but find it a little too cumbersome to get set up and integrated with Horde, as well as not quite meeting my needs.

Learning QT - Hello World

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:11 — sgrover

So tonight I found myself caught up with my outstanding tasks (mostly), and decided to tackle QT some more. So, I read through Chapter 1 of the C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 book and punched in the samples provided.

Why We love AJAX - Rebuttal

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:07 — sgrover

UPDATED: Jan 2, 2007 - changed the links to Dan's blog and the Why We Love AJAX article. They now point to the content on Dan's new blog - http://bizopensource.com/

Dan, from the LinuxBiz blog, has a posting titled "Why We Love AJAX". Dan has done a decent job of writing about the topic from a business perspective. Unfortunately, developers have a different view of AJAX.

Know your user

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:07 — sgrover

I have to shake my head toooo many times when I visit some websites. So many have bought into the propaganda that "98% of the web browsers have Flash". This simply isn't the case. I often will not install flash on my systems, for various reasons, and sometimes I simply cannot install flash. For example, I'm running Kubuntu Linux on my desktop PC, which has an AMD 64 bit processor. So, I'm running the 64bit version of Kubuntu. According to the specs I've seen so far I have only two options to try and get Flash running on this box - install a chrooted instance of a 32 bit distro and do my web browsing from there, or try and get one of the open source projects for running Flash operational on my box. These projects are still beta and from what little I've read, they tend to be unstable at this stage (expected for beta code though).

Getting Started with QT - Revisited

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:06 — sgrover

If you saw my previous post on getting started with QT, you might be starting down the same path I was, and beginning to learn QT through trial and error. The links I provided in that post suggest starting with the book C++ GUI Programming with Qt 3 (ISBN 0-13-124072-2). It turns out the book is available online.

The Art of SQL

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:06 — sgrover

If you are coding, you eventually need to deal with a database. To do so, you need to understand SQL (Structured Query Language). You may get away without knowing SQL if you are not programming business applications, but chances are you'll still need to learn it.

Version Control

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:05 — sgrover

An important part of any coding project is the ability to roll back changes to a previous version - either for the whole project, or for individual components. As a result there are a number of version control (or revision control) options out there. The most well known include CVS, Subversion, and Microsoft Visual Source Safe. If you are starting a new revision system, then I would recommend using Subversion. Here's why:

Getting Started with QT.

Sat, 12/30/2006 - 00:04 — sgrover

I'm looking into how to create a KDE application, which can then be ported to other platforms than Linux. This is a bit of a challenge for me as I have not done any C/C++ coding since the mid 90's - and that was part of my structured programming classes. Since then I've shifted to higher level scripting languages like PHP or Cold Fusion. So, not only do I need a crash course in QT development, but I also need to learn C++ all over again. So, on that note I have begun tracking down resources detailing how to make this happen.